Angelina Jolie and British foreign secretary William Hague at the London summit.

Jolie used her opening speech at the conference on Tuesday to highlight the need for action on wartime sexual violence by recalling a story told to her by the Bosnian rape victim whose attacker during the 1992-95 conflict went unpunished.

The Bosnian woman told her that “she had yet to tell her child that she had been raped because she was so humiliated and she could not bring herself to admit it to him”, Jolie said, according to the AP news agency.

“And she felt that having had no justice for her particular crime, in her particular situation, and having seen the actual man who raped her on the streets free, she really felt abandoned by the world,” she added.